Like radiant sunbursts, today’s signature desert-based, multiday festivals, from the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., and Burning Man in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to the mega-event roster in Las Vegas, continue to energize hundreds of thousands of fans.
Typically featuring A-list entertainment and wildly imaginative production value, these desert extravaganzas are custom-designed departures for cutting loose, which for many adherents means delving into vivid forms of reimagining, restyling and reinvention.
There’s outright fantasy, such as Mad Max-inspired Wasteland, the “world’s largest post-apocalyptic themed festival,” taking place each September in the Mojave Desert north of L.A. And celebrating its 20th anniversary this June in Las Vegas, premier global electronic music dance festival Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) defines hypnotic bedazzlement.
Then there’s Burning Man. With its own “culture of possibility” following “The 10 Principles of Burning Man” set forth by co-founder Larry Harvey, some 70,000 “Burners” gather annually for a week in Nevada starting in late August to build an art-influenced desert city based on codes such as “deeply personal participation” and “creative cooperation and collaboration.”
Comparably found within other signature festivals of the day, these themes echo some fundamental dynamics presently reshaping the meetings industry, such as the central “face-to-face” tenet of the Meetings Means Business movement and Millennial-driven but increasingly cross-generational desire for an alternative “experience.” Does that then make these desert events a viable option for corporate retreats, networking and other engagements—and similar “transformative” rewards and benefits?
The answer seems to be yes. In the Palm Springs market, home of Coachella and other major festivals, Rick Blackburn, vice president of convention sales and destination services at the Greater Palm Springs CVB, sees their “bucket list” appeal for corporate groups.
Predominantly skewing to Millennials, with some psychedelic bacchanals in the mix, festivals may not be for every group taste. The space is certainly there, however, and as festival market DMOs, hotel partners, organizers and participants explain, their economics, marketing power—and fantastic fun—are hard to resist.
Grounds for Success
Launched in 1999, 30 years after Woodstock, Coachella introduced the modern multiday music festival, which now dominates the global concert industry with some 850 annual events in North America alone. Some industry pundits worry about saturation, but clearly not the 99,000 daily attendees at Coachella 2016, or its organizers, reportedly grossing an industry-leading $84 million from the event.
That was just the warm-up for last month’s Desert Trip. Over three days on two successive weekends at Coachella’s festival site, the Empire Polo Club, some 150,000 people saw The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and The Who each perform a full-length concert.
It was indeed epic, with “Oldchella’s” reported $160 million gross the highest-ever for a festival. Bucking traditional concert economics, it reportedly did so with little or no corporate sponsorship, getting revenue instead from lofty admissions ($1,599 for one of 35,000 assigned full-weekend seats) and VIP accommodation options such as luxurious Platinum Estate villas and $10,000 Safari packages. As offered at Coachella, celebrity chefs were on hand, preparing “Outstanding in the Field” sit-down dinners and manning food booths.
There were affordable options, of course, but the pricing, in part to cover massive operating costs, was commensurate with the Baby Boomer audience. While no specific information was available at press time, odds are strong that corporate groups were there.
“In the five years I’ve been in the Coachella Valley, working both at a major resort and at the Greater Palm Springs CVB, I have seen growing interest from corporations in Coachella and our other uber-popular events, which include the Stagecoach country music festival and BNP Paribas Open tennis,” Blackburn said. “Understanding their significance and bucket-list appeal, organizations approach these signature events as an amazing opportunity to entertain corporate clients or create outings and retreats for their high-achieving executives and associates in a not-so-corporate environment.”
Blackburn sees festivals as a match for groups seeking ways to invigorate meetings.
“Bored with traditional spaces, the trend is to constantly explore unique places to gather, and so while Millennial planners and participants certainly gravitate toward these events and creative experiences, we are seeing all generations swiftly moving in this direction,” he said.
Capitalizing on its festival assets in face-to-face conversations and via promotional materials is solid gold for the destination.
“Speaking with meeting professionals around North America, I find that word of our amazing festivals has spread throughout,” Blackburn said. “Everyone wants to experience these signature events, which have only enhanced our already strong brand while giving people of all ages yet another reason to visit the Coachella Valley.”
Great vibes and handsome investment returns also draw groups to another supernova of the festival universe: Las Vegas.
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Mojave Mojo
Expanding an already larger-than-life product set, mega-festivals have categorically reinforced Las Vegas’ “Entertainment Capital of the World” status while underscoring its large-scale hosting supremacy.
Attracting some 7.4 million attendees and $5.1 billion in economic impact since 1991, the Las Vegas market’s annual calendar of “Signature Events” encompasses some of the planet’s biggest multiday music and art extravaganzas, such as EDC, Rock in Rio, iHeartRadio Music Festival and the Life Is Beautiful Music & Art Festival.
“Hosting these events as often and successfully as we do, they are another channel that we are activating for corporate groups,” said Chris Meyer, vice president of global business sales for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
“As a tie-in for corporate gatherings, they are an effective sales tool for reaching meeting planners and their customers, which they can then use to expand engagement with their internal audience,” he continued. “Seeing the same opportunity, our resort partners have created venues and spaces within those venues available to planners for that very purpose.”
MGM Resorts International (see Zoom In Q&A sidebar with Michael Dominguez) has led the trend, investing in festival infrastructure such as MGM Resorts Village and the City of Rock, along with corporate suites and function spaces within the 20,000-seat T-Mobile Arena and nearby 5,000-seat Park Theater, debuting this December with a concert from Stevie Nicks.
Like Palm Springs, festival economics in Vegas are rock solid. Since relocating to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2011, EDC, one of 12 festival brands from global producer Insomniac, has attracted 1.7 million fans and generated $1.3 billion in local economic impact.
Another juggernaut is the three-day Life Is Beautiful Music & Art Festival (see Zoom In Q&A sidebar with Justin Weniger), which just staged its fourth annual edition in late September. Continuing to play a major role in the ongoing revival of downtown Las Vegas, Life Is Beautiful, where music, art and food meet innovative new ideas, has become one of the most inspirational festivals in the country. It attracted some 117,000 attendees in 2016—nearly double the 60,000 the festival drew for its 2013 debut.
Leveraging festival assets to their fullest is an ongoing strategic imperative for Las Vegas, the group market included.
“The next evolution of this great [festival] product is more integration of corporate engagement, not just through advertising and sponsorship but through attendance and participation,” Meyer said. “For memorable experiences and that face-to-face component in a uniquely creative environment, they are a great option for planners and groups.”
To Burn or Not to Burn?
All “dreamers and doers” are welcome to Burning Man, the “temporary metropolis dedicated to community, art, self-expression and self-reliance” created anew each year on the arid lake bed, or “playa,” of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, some 110 miles north of Reno.
In recent years, those participants included Silicon Valley titans such as Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla’s Elon Musk, along with a growing cadre of executives, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
In 2014, Marian Goodell, who now leads efforts to extend the Burning Man “ethos” globally as CEO of the Burning Man Project, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “What we’re seeing are many more of the Fortune 500 leadership, entrepreneurs and small startups bringing their whole team.”
Also well-publicized: the chagrin of some veteran Burners, resentful of the apparent transgressive behavior of these corporate arrivals. Certain actions taken by these industry captains, such as establishing their own exclusive camps, were seen as affronts to Burning Man’s inclusive culture.
This year, backlash against this perceived elitism resulted in a “guerilla-style” attack on one such camp. So is Burning Man right for groups? While the organization did not respond to several requests for an interview, it seems fair to say that groups playing by the rules, especially those, as Blackburn noted earlier, “seeking ways to invigorate meetings and constantly exploring unique places to gather,” would not be disappointed.
With its otherworldly parade of costumed Burners, art installations, towering structures, vehicles and other elements, the view from the playa is compelling indeed.
First experiencing Burning Man in 2015 with CrowdRX, a leading Pennsylvania-based provider of healthcare services to major event venues and festivals (Coachella among them), Dr. Erik Salk (nephew of polio vaccine pioneer Dr. Jonas Salk) found it “really impressive.” As Salk told Weill Cornell Medicine, a publication of his alma mater, “The level of creativity that people bring to it, the commitment, the spirit in this huge city that just pops up overnight in the desert—it’s just unbelievable.”
New York-based healthcare professional Richard Weinstein has been a Burner since 2008.
“Drawn to Burning Man to be part of the community, people come with a sense of wonder and the open-hearted desire to create new connections and possibilities,” he said. “For any organization seeking to bring people together and explore new ideas, the festival, by design, is an experience that you take with you and incorporate in your life and work.”
